Edit: It should probably be designed as a contract which pays out only once a predetermined number of fake blocks have been mined, and the payout to the solvers will be proportional to the number of blocks they have in the final solution chain (wallet addresses of solvers should be encoded in the empty blocks they mine to prevent front-running, which will destroy the incentives). It should be possible to submit any solution to the contract so that everyone competes. This includes solutions that are mined by actual bitcoin miners, effectively pitting the miners mining real blocks against the miners mining empty blocks. Someone who is more skilled than me should design such a contract and put it on Ethereum, ready to receive Ether that someone "finds".